In the spirit of minimalism, you can try this mod as follows:
Each player gets 3 Joker action points every game and that's it. Restrictions on using Jokers described below still apply but you don't need the additional cards to pass around.
In my testing and experience, just this tends to eliminate some 80% cases of losing due to mana problems.
_____________________
So I have this old-and-new Ravnica cube mixed out of cards from both blocks where you draft all 10 guilds at once. It's all fine and dandy, except people die to mana problems a lot.
Regardless of them drafting poorly, neglecting their mana base, or just being a victim of dumb bad luck, it is simply not fun if one side of the table is blocked off from the game in a casual tournament.
I came with an idea to implement a simple, fun, and fair mechanic to tackle this issue while adding a new layer to the game overall - a Joker card for Magic.
In this thread, I'd like to discuss it, develop it, and polish its rules so it works smoothly without a risk of abuse or confusion.
So here are the rules:
(a) Every players gets two Joker cards at the beginning of the tournament.
(b) Before each game, each player places all their Joker cards in their command zone.
(c) Each player may not play more than one Joker card per turn.
(d) Each player may not play more than three Joker cards per game. *)
(e) No player can play a Joker card before their fourth turn. *)
(f) You can play a Joker card any time you could play an instant and it cannot be countered, stolen (Commandeer), blocked off (Orim's Chant), or otherwise affected by normal cards.
The card itself says:
You can't cast Joker during first, second, or third turns of the game. (per (e), also see Serra Avenger)
You can't cast Joker if you have cast another Joker this turn or three Jokers so far in this game. (per (c) and (d) )
Choose one --
(1) Exile a nonland card from your hand: Put a basic land card of a type of your choice that produces mana from the removed card's color identity into your hand. Place Joker in an opponent's command zone. (This action changes ownership.)
(2) Exile a land card from your hand: Draw a card, then place Joker in an opponent's command zone. (This action changes ownership.)
*) Tweak these rules as necessary to accommodate your play group.
Discussion:
Rule (a) is there for balance - you may cast 3 Jokers in a game but they should be used sparingly rather than wastefully. Unless an opponent really needs or wants to pass you a Joker, you'll be one short of the maximum.
Ad (b) - the command zone is traditionally a good place for gimmick cards like this.
Rules (c), (d), (e) are also there for balance - the sole purpose of Jokers is to reasonably alleviate a player of mana screw or mana flood. It is not intended for gambling with mulligans, strategic power play, or any other shenanigans. I tested a similar wild card variant before and this setup seems to work best.
Not sure how to template rule (f) - maybe it needs to be a separate overarching rule.
Rule (1) does not search the library on purpose, to prevent filtering your deck, shuffling it after a scry for free, etc. The basic land should come from outside the game.
(Cards with no color identity should wait for the Barry's Land that will reportedly appear soon, probably in Dragons of Tarkir. Until then, I use a workaround that part of the Joker effect for a colorless card, you must also reveal a colored card from your hand and base the basic land type on it.)
Ad rules (1) and (2) - passing a Joker is an interesting dynamic. Jokers represent a card advantage which you want to save for the gravest of moments. Using a Joker is certainly better than to simply stop in your tracks and lose but the trade-off is that you are giving a free Joker to your opponent. They might use it against you but can also save it for another match. I like the idea of rewarding a player who collects the most Jokers with a special "Ironman" price after the tournament. So even if you lose a tight race because the other player was able to fix up their mana relatively early on, you'll get something out of it and it's up to you what to do with it.
Please, post your comments and suggest improvement to the rules, templating, and wording of the Joker card.
Should this have a mana cost? That would allow you to remove the turn restrictions and simplify it to just:
2, Exile a nonland card from your hand: You may choose a basic land card you own from outside the game, reveal that card, and put it into your hand. Activate this ability only once. 2, Exile a land card from your hand: Draw a card. Activate this ability only once.
The thing is that paying 2 mana would still allow you to keep a bad hand and calculate in advance to fix it up by using a Joker early.
Making it even more expensive would likely just defeat its purpose. That's why I ended up with the turn restriction.
The Joker card should disrupt the regular flow of the game as little as possible and minimize any impact on any rule interactions and strategies not connected to dumb luck when you might just lose the whole game due to being one land short or having one too many - without making an error in deck construction or mulligan decision. This hopefully makes it more acceptable to players who might be opposed to tweaking Magic rules too much, even for a fun casual event.
Ditto for passing Jokers around - if you allow to bend the rules a little to make the game less frustrating overall, I figured that to somehow "compensate" a player facing a Joker might make it more acceptable for casual players to embrace the modification as a whole.
It worked pretty well - in some games, no Joker was used, in others, the race was tight and Jokers were flying back and forth. Even a player who was able to draft and build a quite consistent 2-color deck played a Joker card a couple of times during the tournament.
(1) The only slight problem was with the Ironman mini-game. As currently there's a fixed number of Jokers to go around, with a relatively small number of players, the chances of multiple players ending up with the same high amount of Jokers are not negligible. In our tournament, we had a winner with 4 Jokers (not the overall winner, btw) and two other players finishing with 3 of them.
(2) Also, we played a normal draft with three rounds. Imagine a bigger event played for 5 or 6 rounds. If someone gets unlucky or miscalculates their opening hand badly and wastes all their Jokers in the first match, they will have nothing to play with the next round, possibly for all the remaining rounds. As casual events should not be all about cutthroat competition, this situation can also be remedied. Plus, if someone needs Jokers constantly, they won't actually help them as much as someone with a consistent deck who only gets screwed rarely.
Throughout the time I've been testing with different versions of Jokers, one aspect stands out - better deck still wins, regardless of Jokers. Now, when by playing one you also pass card advantage to your opponent, this holds even more.
Therefore, we can improve upon both (1) and (2) by adding this simple rule:
(g) Before each match, if a player has no Joker cards left, he or she puts a single Joker card to their command zone.
I like the concept because it's crispy and simple. I think it can be made better by the following substitutions...
(a) Every players gets two Joker cards at the beginning of EACH MATCH. (Why should start a match against a new opponent with an advantage/disadvantage based on a prior round against a different opponent?)
(d) Each player may not play more than three Joker cards per game. (This should rarely come up anyway, but why not? The passing of Joker cards makes it inherently fair.)
(e) No player can play a Joker card before their fourth turn. (Sometimes but rarely it's appropriate to keep a 1 or 2 land hand. Being unable to dig for land #2 or #3 until turn 4 is crippling.)
In your experience, do you like this rule more than Magic 2.0 from another thread? Do you think canceling rules (d) and (e) would lead to exploitation?
Add the following:
(g) In multiplayer and Commander, you can't pass a Joker to a player who has 3 Joker cards.
In the spirit of minimalism, my play group ended up with something even simpler:
Each player gets 3 Joker action points every game, no strings attached. Other restrictions described above apply as normal, you just don't need the cards if you're not interested in the Ironman mini-game.
To answer your questions, Joker cards are less comprehensive than M2.0 but are so simple that more players are inclined to try them out. That's what counts.
And yes, d) is there to put a cap on twisting normal Magic rules, e) should prevent gambling with mulligans. Both are supposed to make the mod more palatable to conservative players in casual environment.
In the spirit of minimalism, you can try this mod as follows:
Each player gets 3 Joker action points every game and that's it. Restrictions on using Jokers described below still apply but you don't need the additional cards to pass around.
In my testing and experience, just this tends to eliminate some 80% cases of losing due to mana problems.
_____________________
So I have this old-and-new Ravnica cube mixed out of cards from both blocks where you draft all 10 guilds at once. It's all fine and dandy, except people die to mana problems a lot.
Regardless of them drafting poorly, neglecting their mana base, or just being a victim of dumb bad luck, it is simply not fun if one side of the table is blocked off from the game in a casual tournament.
I came with an idea to implement a simple, fun, and fair mechanic to tackle this issue while adding a new layer to the game overall - a Joker card for Magic.
In this thread, I'd like to discuss it, develop it, and polish its rules so it works smoothly without a risk of abuse or confusion.
So here are the rules:
(a) Every players gets two Joker cards at the beginning of the tournament.
(b) Before each game, each player places all their Joker cards in their command zone.
(c) Each player may not play more than one Joker card per turn.
(d) Each player may not play more than three Joker cards per game. *)
(e) No player can play a Joker card before their fourth turn. *)
(f) You can play a Joker card any time you could play an instant and it cannot be countered, stolen (Commandeer), blocked off (Orim's Chant), or otherwise affected by normal cards.
The card itself says:
You can't cast Joker during first, second, or third turns of the game. (per (e), also see Serra Avenger)
You can't cast Joker if you have cast another Joker this turn or three Jokers so far in this game. (per (c) and (d) )
Choose one --
*) Tweak these rules as necessary to accommodate your play group.
Discussion:
Rule (a) is there for balance - you may cast 3 Jokers in a game but they should be used sparingly rather than wastefully. Unless an opponent really needs or wants to pass you a Joker, you'll be one short of the maximum.
Ad (b) - the command zone is traditionally a good place for gimmick cards like this.
Rules (c), (d), (e) are also there for balance - the sole purpose of Jokers is to reasonably alleviate a player of mana screw or mana flood. It is not intended for gambling with mulligans, strategic power play, or any other shenanigans. I tested a similar wild card variant before and this setup seems to work best.
Not sure how to template rule (f) - maybe it needs to be a separate overarching rule.
Rule (1) does not search the library on purpose, to prevent filtering your deck, shuffling it after a scry for free, etc. The basic land should come from outside the game.
(Cards with no color identity should wait for the Barry's Land that will reportedly appear soon, probably in Dragons of Tarkir. Until then, I use a workaround that part of the Joker effect for a colorless card, you must also reveal a colored card from your hand and base the basic land type on it.)
Ad rules (1) and (2) - passing a Joker is an interesting dynamic. Jokers represent a card advantage which you want to save for the gravest of moments. Using a Joker is certainly better than to simply stop in your tracks and lose but the trade-off is that you are giving a free Joker to your opponent. They might use it against you but can also save it for another match. I like the idea of rewarding a player who collects the most Jokers with a special "Ironman" price after the tournament. So even if you lose a tight race because the other player was able to fix up their mana relatively early on, you'll get something out of it and it's up to you what to do with it.
Please, post your comments and suggest improvement to the rules, templating, and wording of the Joker card.
Post 1
Post 2
Post 3
Tired of losing to mana problems or interested to learn more about Magic's mana system?
Comprehensive take
Simplified solution
Are you a fan of Magic and the Game of Thrones?
2, Exile a land card from your hand: Draw a card. Activate this ability only once.
Making it even more expensive would likely just defeat its purpose. That's why I ended up with the turn restriction.
The Joker card should disrupt the regular flow of the game as little as possible and minimize any impact on any rule interactions and strategies not connected to dumb luck when you might just lose the whole game due to being one land short or having one too many - without making an error in deck construction or mulligan decision. This hopefully makes it more acceptable to players who might be opposed to tweaking Magic rules too much, even for a fun casual event.
Ditto for passing Jokers around - if you allow to bend the rules a little to make the game less frustrating overall, I figured that to somehow "compensate" a player facing a Joker might make it more acceptable for casual players to embrace the modification as a whole.
I'll expand my testing to find the right balance.
Thanks
Post 1
Post 2
Post 3
Tired of losing to mana problems or interested to learn more about Magic's mana system?
Comprehensive take
Simplified solution
Are you a fan of Magic and the Game of Thrones?
Enjoy
Post 1
Post 2
Post 3
Tired of losing to mana problems or interested to learn more about Magic's mana system?
Comprehensive take
Simplified solution
Are you a fan of Magic and the Game of Thrones?
It worked pretty well - in some games, no Joker was used, in others, the race was tight and Jokers were flying back and forth. Even a player who was able to draft and build a quite consistent 2-color deck played a Joker card a couple of times during the tournament.
(1) The only slight problem was with the Ironman mini-game. As currently there's a fixed number of Jokers to go around, with a relatively small number of players, the chances of multiple players ending up with the same high amount of Jokers are not negligible. In our tournament, we had a winner with 4 Jokers (not the overall winner, btw) and two other players finishing with 3 of them.
(2) Also, we played a normal draft with three rounds. Imagine a bigger event played for 5 or 6 rounds. If someone gets unlucky or miscalculates their opening hand badly and wastes all their Jokers in the first match, they will have nothing to play with the next round, possibly for all the remaining rounds. As casual events should not be all about cutthroat competition, this situation can also be remedied. Plus, if someone needs Jokers constantly, they won't actually help them as much as someone with a consistent deck who only gets screwed rarely.
Throughout the time I've been testing with different versions of Jokers, one aspect stands out - better deck still wins, regardless of Jokers. Now, when by playing one you also pass card advantage to your opponent, this holds even more.
Therefore, we can improve upon both (1) and (2) by adding this simple rule:
(g) Before each match, if a player has no Joker cards left, he or she puts a single Joker card to their command zone.
More testing ahead.
Post 1
Post 2
Post 3
Tired of losing to mana problems or interested to learn more about Magic's mana system?
Comprehensive take
Simplified solution
Are you a fan of Magic and the Game of Thrones?
(a) Every players gets two Joker cards at the beginning of EACH MATCH. (Why should start a match against a new opponent with an advantage/disadvantage based on a prior round against a different opponent?)
(d) Each player may not play more than three Joker cards per game.(This should rarely come up anyway, but why not? The passing of Joker cards makes it inherently fair.)(e) No player can play a Joker card before their fourth turn.(Sometimes but rarely it's appropriate to keep a 1 or 2 land hand. Being unable to dig for land #2 or #3 until turn 4 is crippling.)In your experience, do you like this rule more than Magic 2.0 from another thread? Do you think canceling rules (d) and (e) would lead to exploitation?
Add the following:
(g) In multiplayer and Commander, you can't pass a Joker to a player who has 3 Joker cards.
Each player gets 3 Joker action points every game, no strings attached. Other restrictions described above apply as normal, you just don't need the cards if you're not interested in the Ironman mini-game.
To answer your questions, Joker cards are less comprehensive than M2.0 but are so simple that more players are inclined to try them out. That's what counts.
And yes, d) is there to put a cap on twisting normal Magic rules, e) should prevent gambling with mulligans. Both are supposed to make the mod more palatable to conservative players in casual environment.
Thanks
Post 1
Post 2
Post 3
Tired of losing to mana problems or interested to learn more about Magic's mana system?
Comprehensive take
Simplified solution
Are you a fan of Magic and the Game of Thrones?